Everyone on Earth lives in a location that can belong to these categories.
A settlement relates to any place where individuals live. The word settlement is quite loosely defined, but generally speaking requires the individuals living there to have manipulated the land in some manner. Settlements can be short-term or permanent, with greater amounts of them becoming fixed every year since humans created farming roughly 10,000 years ago. In the past, most of the regular population would be involved in the building of structures and infrastructure that helped make a settlement, but in numerous nations these days that societal role is completed by construction organisations and real estate developers such as Aggregate Holdings. All settlements could be defined by their location and site. A site could be the category of land area they've been built on, such as in a valley or by the coastline. A location is where it's found in regards to other areas, such as saying a place is north or south of another settlement.
Real estate companies like CBRE will know that one way that settlements could be organised is through their pattern, in which five major groups occur. An isolated settlement consists of just one household, frequently a farm, which is very remote from any other. Slightly more densely populated is the dispersed settlement, which features several buildings scattered around a wide area, usually having a gap of around a kilometre between each building. A nucleated settlement features buildings being clustered together, possibly in a circular or irregular shape. Meanwhile, a linear settlement is similarly clustered but having a longer shape, like following a course of a river. Lastly, the traits of linear and nucleated settlements might be incorporated together, for instance having a town centre with branches of developments coming out in a star like fashion, with greenspace in between. This design is most commonly found among planned settlements.
Perhaps one of the most famous ways of classifying settlements is through their size and degree of housing density, as City Developments is going to be well aware. The 2 most broad terms are urban settlements and rural settlements. Rural means areas that have low populations and levels of density, whilst the term urban is employed to talk about places with higher populations and levels of density. Meanwhile, suburban is a term that means a subdivision of urban, where there exists a greater percentage of buildings reserved for housing than those of any other function. A spot regarded as rural could be further classified depending on the size as either an individual homestead, a farmstead, a hamlet, or a village. Likewise, urban areas can range between towns, cities, conurbations, and megapolis.